Those of you old enough, know who promoter Bill Graham (Fillmore, Fillmore East) was and his pivotal role in pyschedelic music and much more. Recently it has come out that his massive vaults of concert tapes was sold by his estate and has been put up on the web! See the major piece ono the front page of the business section of the LA Times on Sunday Nov. 12, 2006 for more ( LATimes.com )

A “reperformance” of Glenn Gould’s famous 1955 mono rendition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations played at the Yamaha piano studios in New York on March 7.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEINNY TimesPublished: March 12, 2007

Was that relief I felt as the piano was playing? A feeling that some worry had been alleviated or a fear quieted? Why then was it also mixed with disappointment, as if some deep yearning had been thwarted? Not yet, not yet, not yet: relief and frustration intertwined.

For months I had deliberately avoided listening. A technologically oriented, musically sophisticated company, Zenph Studios (zenph.com), claimed that it could bring the voices of the musical dead back to life. It could achieve, that is, what technology has long dreamt of: It would make light of the material world and all its restrictions.

Zenph claimed it could take a 50-year-old mono recording and distill from its hiss-laden, squished sound all of the musical information that originally went into it. It wouldn’t “process” the recording to get rid of noise; it wouldn’t pretend to turn mono into stereo; it wouldn’t try to correct things that were sonically “wrong.” Instead the claim was that it would, using its proprietary software, learn from recorded sound precisely how an instrument — a piano, for starters — was played, with what force a key was struck, how far down the sustain pedal was pressed, when each finger moved, how each note was weighted in a complex chord and what sort of timbre was actually produced.

Then it would effectively recreate the instrument. A digital file encoded with this information would be read by Yamaha’s advanced Disklavier Pro — a computerized player piano — and transformed into music. A recorded piano becomes a played piano. This would be sonic teleportation, monochromatic forms reincarnated as three-dimensional sound — not colorization but re-creation.

Zenph also announced it had accomplished this feat of technological legerdemain with one of the most remarkable recordings of the last century: Glenn Gould’s 1955 mono rendition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. Gould, who retreated from performance into the private realm of the recording studio where he could splice and fiddle with sound and phrase, would be posthumously pulled back into the realm of public performance.

Gould believed technology liberated performer and listener. Here this pianist, who died in 1982, would be freed from the ultimate constraint.

And indeed, last September in Toronto, Zenph gave a public “reperformance” of Gould’s “Goldbergs” on a specially prepared Yamaha Disklavier. Zenph’s “Goldbergs” inspired a standing ovation from the audience members, many of whom knew Gould and some of whom had heard him play live. The press reports glowed.

Then one day last week Zenph — which took its name from “senf,” the German word for mustard — brought a press demonstration of its “Goldbergs” to Yamaha’s New York piano studios, playing portions of the work both on the Disklavier and from its recording, due to be released at the end of May on Sony BMG Masterworks.

Before the demonstration I returned to the 1955 recording, which I had not heard for several years. I was swept away again. This is not spiritual playing, plumbing the profundity of Bach’s meditations; it is ecstatic, uncanny in its intoxication. The recording is skittish, illuminating, thrilling and extraordinarily physical: the playing seeps into muscles as well as ears; every phrase exerts the pressure and play of dance.

John Q. Walker, Zenph’s president, knows this as well. He is a brilliant software engineer (who did important work in computer networking) and a musician who speaks of his enterprise with impassioned fervor. Last week, when he started the Yamaha instrument playing his encodings of Gould, something thrilling really did take place. The piano produced sounds that were indisputably human and unmistakably Gouldian. The playing could not have come from any other pianist.

But wait. ... Gould’s recorded piano sound is dry, as if each note were squeezed free of moisture. The phrases quiver; connections between notes are tensile, as if they were being held together by sinews. But at the demonstration the sound was often plump, rotund, even bell-like. That is partly the character of Yamaha pianos. And isn’t that a problem? Any great pianist will adjust a performance to the instrument, treating one with a “wet sound” differently from one with more sharply etched qualities, phrasing differently, even adjusting tempo. This difference in instruments limits Zenph’s claims; it also seemed to slacken the music’s sinews.

Presumably though the recording — done on another Yamaha that the piano technician, Marc Wienert, voiced to resemble Gould’s old Steinway — would have a better effect. Yet it leaves a similar impression. Is this some psychoacoustic phenomenon then, some disorientation caused by close familiarity with the old mono sound? When recordings were first becoming widely available at the turn of the 20th century, there were demonstrations in concert halls in which singers would begin a song, and a hidden gramophone with its amplifying horn would complete it. One London newspaper reported: “The most sensitive ear could not detect the slightest difference between the tone of the singer and the tone of the mechanical device.”

Bizarre. But am I experiencing something in reverse, treating sonic antiquity with reverence and not recognizing musical similarities? We all learn languages of listening, ways of interpreting reproductions, imagining full-size orchestras emerging from clock radios, ignoring hisses or distortions, compensating for flaws.

Does the new instrumentation seem less convincing because it disrupts the old familiar language of listening? I don’t think so. In Zenph’s recording, the music’s tensile line really is loosened. I admire what I hear and might not even realize what was missing without comparing, but I am not intoxicated with Gould’s exuberance or infected with his ecstatic amazement. The music is the same, yet not the same.

Of course one might say, “How could it be otherwise?” Think of the kinds of processing and analysis that had to be done: filtering out Gould’s hums or groans, isolating the sound of the piano with all its intricate overtones, taking into account the way sound was compressed or altered by every microphone, processor or wire it passed through.

Then there’s another step: “reverse engineering” the sound, as if reconstructing the instrument that created it. Then another: producing the music from yet another instrument, Yamaha’s Disklavier. And another: recording the music yet again.

The process is mind-bogglingly complex. And at every moment there are also human decisions — adjustments of the piano, musical alterations. Perhaps over time both human practice and technological possibilities will evolve further, leaving fewer distinctions. A recording by Art Tatum is due next from Zenph, along with other recordings from Sony BMG Masterworks’ rich archives.

But why all this effort? (Five man-months for a “reperformance,” as Mr. Walker explained.) Partly perhaps because contemporary sound is considered preferable and marketable. Partly because, as Zenph’s Web site points out, the great recordings of the past are passing into the public domain. The European Union allows just 50 years of protection — and this is a way of maintaining proprietary control.

But is the result really musically superior? It could only be that if there were absolutely nothing lost and every difference were an improvement; neither is the case. This is a disappointment then, though one that is exhilarating in its enterprise and promise.

The disappointment is also a relief. For had Zenph succeeded, there would have been a severe price. Had that really been Gould’s sound coming from the piano, it would have dealt a severe blow indeed to an ancient prejudice: that music, in all its complexity, is beyond the reach of the merely technical, and that it belongs, in creation and interpretation, to humanity’s ever-shrinking domain. Relief: no Gouldian robotics. Yet.

Connections, a critic’s perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Monday, April 9, 2007 1 p.m. ETPost Magazine: Too Busy to Stop and Hear the MusicCan one of the nation's greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Gene Weingarten set out to discover if violinist Josh Bell -- and his Stradivarius -- could stop busy commuters in their tracks.

Save & Share Article What's This?

DiggGoogledel.icio.usYahoo!RedditFacebook

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

"How'd I do?"

We'll tell you in a minute.

"Well, who was the musician?"

Joshua Bell.

"NO!!!"

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.

"Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ."

He smiled.

". . . on Kreisler's violin."

It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick -- and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie "The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a god."

When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

"Uh, a stunt?"

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

"Sounds like fun," he said.

Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro, in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling. That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.

He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell.

Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously, with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw."

For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.

It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.

It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.

One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts," Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees.

Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.

Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.

AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant."

At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.

On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they were of a mind to take note.

Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."

Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

So, that's the piece Bell started with.

He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story."

With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."

And that's that.

Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's bow first touched the strings.

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing."

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes.

As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace."

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.

After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to work. He was at work.

The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was.

But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."

A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in "Titanic," before the iceberg.

"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

"Is he ever going to play around here again?"

"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."

"Damn."

Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.

BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.

It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

"YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him struck me as much of anything."

You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn't noticing the music at all.

"I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially."

What do you do, Jackie?

"I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract."

THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes.

Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined."

Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he tried to calm her down.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

What about Joshua Bell?

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here."

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance."

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head.

Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza."

Haven't you seen musicians there before?

"Not like this one."

What do you mean?

"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."

Really?

"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day."

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me."

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES, in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift.

Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post.

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.")

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.

Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff writer, can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m.

BEGGING A PARDON: Florida Governor Charlie Crist stating that he is seriously considering pardoning Jim Morrison's 1970 indecent exposure and profanity convictions stemming from a 1969 concert in Miami. The Doors frontman was appealing the convictions at the time of his death in 1971, when he was only 27. "Trying to clear his name and then he dies. If you have a heart pounding in your chest, that has to tug at you a little bit," Crist said.

Charles Telerant trains in the FMA as well. Apparently he attended Datu Worden's camp in 06 and had a great time.

Logged

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

Excellent, I didnt know he is a Jazz Musician. I wonder if that could be another thread.... the relation between Martial Arts and Musicianship / Art. I mean there are many people who express themselves through Martial Arts and through Music \ Art in various forms including dancing.

Logged

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

"So, a friend in my battalion received a Fender Stratocaster from you guys. It was amazing! . . . It's been about 6 months since I have played and it was so awesome playing the guitar my friend got. He told me about you guys, so I thought I would see if maybe I can get my own guitar."

And that is how Sgt. Jason Low received an acoustic guitar from Steve Baker, a Vietnam veteran of modest means and powerful purpose. Baker and his wife, Barb, run Fergus Music, a shop here in a rural patch of Minnesota not far from the North Dakota line. Together, they have shipped more than 300 guitars, mandolins, harmonicas, drums and wind instruments to Iraq to ease the strain of the soldiering life.

Fifty more will soon be on the way, thanks to $800 raised at an Elks club spaghetti dinner and $1,500 chipped in by two local businesses. In response, the Bakers receive notes such as this one, sent April 17 by Luis Rivera:

"Yahooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! I have something to look forward to. Thank you very much."

Steve Baker served as an Army Ranger in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Wiry and mustachioed at 62, and tending toward T-shirts and jeans, he moves between the music shop and the crowded back room where he keeps guitar-ready cardboard boxes and his computer, which seems constantly abuzz with e-mails from Iraq.

"This started as a fluke," Baker said.

In 2004, his stepson, a soldier in Iraq, requested a guitar, so he sent one. The stepson's friend wanted one, so he dispatched another. Pretty soon, the requests were coming faster than the newly christened Operation Happy Note could respond. The waiting list is now more than 150 names long.

The store does not generate enough income to do all the things the Bakers would like to do, but they manage. Steve Baker, who says he previously owned a music store before losing it in a divorce, had been repairing commercial refrigerators before he bought Fergus Music in 2003.

"I didn't realize how much of a going concern this wasn't," he says now. And that was before Happy Note.

"When you do something like this, you're not making money, you're losing it," Baker said of the volunteer project. He added, "I don't care."

The operation to send free instruments has benefited from the generosity of others, such as a woman in Elbow Lake who printed posters, no charge. Then there was the lucky moment when Barb Baker spotted a garage door company giving away bubble wrap. She filled their Jeep with it. In March 2005, the Bakers held their first fundraiser, and have brought in about $13,000 since.

The Bakers have boxed up violins, clarinets, bongos, harmonicas and stringed instruments, along with picks, extra strings and teaching guides created by Steve, who gives lessons in Fergus Falls and has a weekly band gig. When someone asked for cymbals for a military chapel, he took an $800 pair from the shop's wall and packed them up.

A soldier wrote to say that his wife wanted to buy him a Bach Stradivarius trumpet as an anniversary present. The Bakers found one and shipped it off. The acoustic guitars come from the factory, six to a box, for $31 apiece. The Bakers repack them in individual cartons. Postage is $20.80 and travel time is seven to 15 days. Attempts to find a political sponsor to lobby for free postage have so far failed.

"If we didn't have so much postage," Steve Baker said, "we could send more instruments."

As for who receives them, all he knows is that they're American fighting men and women: "I don't care where they're from. They're wearing the uniform. They're protecting us."

Baker's passion for the project has its roots in his experience in the Vietnam War and the years that followed.

"When I was in, nobody cared. I mean, Vietnam, my God," he said, recalling how some Americans swore at troops. "All I got was hooting and hollering, and I remember that to this day. There's no way I'm going to allow that to happen to these kids."

Happy Note is hardly the sole provider of musical instruments. Army Sgt. 1st Class Charles Covey, who asked the Bakers for help, explained in an e-mail that budget constraints have made it necessary for his 25th Infantry Division unit to appeal to private organizations for donations to support base recreation centers.

Between Baghdad and Tikrit, Covey said in response to e-mailed questions, soldiers have received about 100 acoustic guitars, "along with a couple of electric guitars, a bass and an old drum set. They were donated by Fender and the Charlie Daniels Band. (He is a big supporter of the Troops.)" Recent requests range from mandolins to a piano.

Camp Speicher, a military base north of Baghdad, holds informal jam sessions on Wednesdays and Fridays, Covey said, and the division band performs. He reported an increasing desire for electric guitars and keyboards, bass guitars and fiddles, and large amplifiers.

Robert Thierfelder filled one of the more unusual requests relayed to the Bakers. He sent to Iraq three practice chanters, similar to recorders, that bagpipers use to perfect their craft, along with instruction CDs and books. Thierfelder, who runs a bagpipe company, said, "It's the least I can do."

Army Spec. Nathan J.J. Hoskins sent word to the Bakers that two guitars had reached the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade at Camp Taji and were gratefully received. He told the Bakers they were doing "an awesome job. You bring joy to many troops that otherwise may be down in the dumps."

One glad recipient was Spec. Mark Gordon, who could hardly believe that a stranger thousands of miles away would send him a gleaming guitar just because he had asked. "Yet here I sit with mine," he wrote in an e-mail from Baghdad. To relieve stress, he said, he had played every day before he deployed -- so often that he felt it had become a way of life. But when he mobilized, carrying a guitar was out of the question.

After learning of Happy Note from an officer in his unit, he e-mailed the Bakers and quickly received an affirmative reply. He had to read it twice before it sank in. When the guitar arrived in a 3-foot-by-2-foot box, he considered it "satisfying and overwhelming that the kindness of the world has not diminished and people still care about us over here."

Now that he has the guitar, Gordon wrote, friends and battle buddies cram into his room to listen and play.

"The uplifting rhythm of all jazz and blues riffs calm my soul and warm my heart," he said. "It only takes one song to feel like I'm at home."

« Last Edit: June 12, 2007, 06:14:43 PM by Robertlk808 »

Logged

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

Notice how Toby Keith has these stories on his website about how he came up with the lyrics for some of his songs. I *allege* this all made up. I believe he is posting this because it is one of his ways of "documenting" something. I have good reason to believe it is alll made up. I have reason to believe this guy didn't write these songs. I guess he is worried enough he feels he has to come up with stories that he believes will help legitimize his claims. I was telling an Indian colleague of mine how I believe that all the top singers who claim they write their songs are full of baloney and that they don't. The songs are stolen and transferred or sold to them or the people stealing them are silent partners who get a piece of the action. His response was you are kidding? You mean they all lie here like in India! Everyone in India knows the songs are not written by the stars who claim them. People here just don't know the same is true here! Well as is said - live and learn. Corruption is world wide. I emphasize these are just my allegations and my beliefs.

Clear Channel owns billboard as well as other adverstising outlets along with other probably other connections throughout the media industry. People who know my posts know I've posted how my wife and I are stalked because she is a genius at writing music lyrics that sell and she has had hundreds stolen in many different ways.

Well when we were in Florida I used to carry a weapon with me when I would walk the dogs around the gulf course at night. One time a leaned over to adjust my dog's lease and I suddenly realized my shirt tail popped up exposing the handgun in the back of my pants. Well as I pulled down my shirt I saw this guy driving around and turning the corner behind me and leaning over in his car watching what I was doing. I saw this guy several times drive by my house. I also saw him standing by my car at a gas station when I saw them trying to get into my car where I would usually stop for coffee and a roll on the way to work. I also saw his vehicle several states away while my wife and I were driving up North and they were attempting to break in our Uhaul. They were even following us with another Uhaul to try to make a swicth but that didn't work. So I know this guy was stalking me.

Anyway a week after this guy saw me inadvertently exposed my concealed weapon while driving home from work I pass a billboard.On the way to work I would pass several billboards many of them advertising the country singers all of whom were singing and many claiming to have written my wife's music lyrics. This day on the billboard was a message that was clearly and undeniably to me. It stated that even simply pulling a gun was an automatic sentence of years (if forgot the number) in jail and using the gun would be like 25 years plus.

It all fits. Clear Channel whose radio outlets are tied in with "charts" and the club of people who control what gets on the air also owns and controls thousands of billboards around the country. They also are networked with other advertisers and obvioulsy have contacts all over the industry as well. Where do their "writers" get their ideas from? Well my wife and I say things in our house where we are certain we are being listened to by professional thieves whose job it is is to watch us and think of ways to get to my wife's lyrics. Many of the jokes we say or lines we come up with we later hear on commercials, occasionally (since we don't ordinarily watch cartoons we don't know for sure) in cartoons, and even other places. some of these may well be coincidences but some are not. I wonder how many other people these "writiers" monitor to get "ideas" from for their advertising?

Oh, and by the way we've also seen the obvious tie between and auto makers who use music extensively in their advertising. Especially for and gm who love to use the coutnry stars and their music to sell to trucks to the red neck crowd.

Is it beyond the thoughts of a rational person to think GPS systems could not and are not being used to track people of interest? Maybe not at the top coporate level, but how much would it take to bribe one of their people to do this? I don't have Onstar or related GPS in my vehicle (unless covertly placed there), but it ain't hard to think this isn't being used for other purposes than just safety data:

The companies would of course deny it. But say if it were true who is going to know and don't think any law enforcement would even give a hoot about it were happening. People like to express worry about the Feds watching us. The real danger is the private industries that do IMO.

"The history of ancient and modern republics had taught themthat many of the evils which those republics suffered arosefrom the want of a certain balance, and that mutual controlindispensable to a wise administration. They were convincedthat popular assemblies are frequently misguided by ignorance,by sudden impulses, and the intrigues of ambitious men; and thatsome firm barrier against these operations was necessary. They,therefore, instituted your Senate."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention,June 1788)

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

Towards the end of the day, I enjoy the soothing sounds of some new (to me!) artsits in the 'ambient' genre.One of my personal picks is a gent by the name of Robert Rich.If you haven't heard of him, but enjoy the ambient genre, this artist has quite a background along with an education level that explains a few things about the complexities and subtleties of his work. He's also been around for a long time.

Most of his work is available through iTunes. Note: this is not meant to advocate or promote Apple, iTunes or iPod. It's simply what I happen to have and use for my own personal entertainment presently.

To siphon off the day's static, I put my headphones on -sometimes as I lie in bed- and dial up Mr. Rich's playlists. His sounds, along with deep breathing, truly put the meaning of relaxation back into my vocabulary; and it had been quite a while before finding this artists' body of work that I was able to relax to such a level (without being asleep).

If decompression by way of ambient music is something you might be interested in, here are my personal favorite albums by Robert Rich:

Trances and Drones.Yearning (Woodwind, strings, very Asian sound). Calling Down the Sky.Echo of Small Things.Desert Triptych (This is for brave souls, be warned).A Troubled Resting Place.Somnium.Inner Landscapes.

I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me. Certainly these sounds have become one of my favorite tools readily available to promote mental fitness. There are, of course, other genres that are not what I'd call 'Decompression,' which I use during workouts or drills, but I will post my thoughts on those in the near future.

The mention of early Jefferson Airplane in the first post reminded me: I've gotta dig up some of the old Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span songs on my hard drive and give 'em a spin. It's been a while.

I still allege this chick couldn't write lyrics or come up with a melody to save her life. Why No One has sold can only be testiment to finanically storng backers because 'no one' can tell me this is a good song. The melody is obviously so strained. So much a melody from someone who can't come up with a decent melody so goes up and down octaves trying to make it sound different.

I say there is something going here with this turn around about her shifting gears to policitics. Even her mother is shocked at this stuff. The reason I believe she is pouting this stuff is because she can't get anymore material other than this. If she really could write she could and would be writing about whatever she chooses. So now she has to play the game. Make up stories about versatility. That her interest has shifted focus and that explains this total change. But I believe the truth is - that this is all the material that was stolen so this is what she has to use. Anyway, that is the fraud behind the music "industry".

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

I haven't heard or do I care much about it or that Dolly is "humilialted". I alledge Parton has for years sung and claimed to have written songs she never wrote. Blue Ridge Mountain Boy it was known in Nashville was said to be written by Kathy Mateo not Parton as she claimed.

Of course she also seems to be singing and claiming songs that are exactly like my wife has written. She also claims to have 3000 copywritten songs and writes exactly the way my wife writes. Ideas pop into her head and she just keeps notes on her all day long later finishing the song. Wow! Years ago she said that to wirte lyrics she would have to go off to a cabin in the woods where there was total piece and quiet to be able to concentrate and not be distracted to be able to come up with anything. Now her story is changed. It is amazing how all these Country stars claim they have hundreds or even thousands of songs written. Well where are they? So why is Shania Twain delaying her album from January to March and now November?Whatever excuse they will use, and they can make up anything, who will know otherwise, I know the real reason. Look up a song she claims called shoes. Why isn't it released here in the US? They must not have finished the "clean up".

So Dolly, as far as I am concerned you a phoney full of crap mannequin:

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Country music star Dolly Parton has hit back against Howard Stern's satellite radio show, which last week manipulated recordings from one of her audio books into seemingly racist and sexually graphic sound bites.

"I have never been so shocked, hurt and humiliated in all my life," Parton said in a statement on Wednesday. "I cannot believe what Howard Stern has done to me. In a blue million years, I would never have such vulgar things come out of my mouth. They have done editing or some sort of trickery to make this horrible, horrible thing. Please accept my apology for them and certainly know I had nothing to do with this."

She concluded: "If there was ever going to be a lawsuit, it's going to be over this. Just wanted you to know that I am completely devastated by this."

"The Howard Stern Show" frequently utilizes audio book recordings in this fashion; altered clips from "Star Trek" actor George Takei became a staple of the program in recent years.

05/23/2008 5:58 PM, E! OnlineJessica Simpson hopped off her flight from Mexico and jumped right back to work.The pop star, who returned to Los Angeles yesterday after spending a few days unwinding (from what, we wonder) with her family south of the border, apparently isn't in the mood for more R&R.She was on the move today, making a quick stop at a Marriott hotel in Sherman Oaks and then holing up in a West Hollywood recording studio.A source close to the songstress told E! News that Simpson planned to spend six to eight hours at the studio working on material for a "country crossover" album.Sounds about right for a little lady who's been suspiciously without her Cowboy for awhile.****

My guess. A group of crooks stole her the "material" got her up to the studio ASAP to record it in secret before someone else can steal it. I just hope the lyrics are not Katherine's. And Simpson the dope she appears to be gets the singing credits. Somehow her and her poppa have an "in" in the "business". It ain't because he's a genius and obviously not she.

Another coincidence. After her first bomb album in 1993 there were rumors of a split with her guy Mutt Lange who it is no coincidence goes out of his way not to be seen in public (how many pictures have we seen of this guy?). Then after being at a hotel and realizing that songs she and Mutt supposedly wrote were "hits" like, wow, it dawned on us that all these lyrics we wrote were the hits we were waiting for, their marriage was suddenly not a question. Then the next few years are history when they came out with their hit albums with lyrics that were what I remember we had on our dell computer back in '95.Then they again later had some problems until they came out with "Up", again with lyrics exactly like those we had on a computer.Now the album that she was supposed to come out with in January is delayed to later in the year. This the same time we stopped letting *anyone* into our house. The same time the game is finally up with my "mother"-in-law who I told Katherine years ago was robbing her and not until some weeks back she said sadly she finally overcame her denials and realized it is true - her own mother - is robbing her.

Her mother's first house that she ever owned, she had fixed up and now traded in another and has the other one fixed up and all ready to sell for her move to Vegas. This from someone who is now over 65 and never made money in real estate before. She works as an aid in a nursing home but suddenly has all this cash to fix up houses at bargain rates from guys who offered to come all the way down from far upstate NY to central NJ to help us with our house. (Aren't they swell?) That is one way the crooks in the music business pay off people. They send their union tradesman over to fix up the houses of those that participate in scams to steal songs. The same neighbors that watch when you leave the house, that walk by and grab your mail from your porch, or live on your garbage man's route and bribe the garbage man to give them your garbage (when they thought Katherine was throwing out discarded song lyrics), follow you to the store, or post office(when Katherine or I were mailing in Copyrights that for whatever reason never went throught the system like they were supposed to or were tampered with by the time you see the finished processed document) and wave while they are watching your every move (as though they are your friendly neighbor). And in return your neighbor gets a pool, another who was in financial trouble suddenly has a new car, others have new roofs, the expensive PVC fences, new siding, grounds that are made to look like french or Italian villas (in a lower working class neighborhood), garages completely redone, etc.

Now the news is Twain's guy is cheating. Well golly gee - is that why no album? Is that the reason why the album that was supposed to be out in January is now delayed and won't be out till the end of the year?.My wife has not left our house in two fucking years because she would rather die than give up the rest of her songs and she knows that there is almost no person on this Earth who she can trust and who is beyond being bribed. Even her own low life dirt ball white trash mother.About 2 years ago I heard her mother slamming draws and doors upstairs once while Katherine was out of the house. I told her her mother was searching the bedroom upstairs. I told her once and for all I was certain her mother was robbing us. She was in denial - "my own mother" couldn't do that. Now she realizes that her mother who would come down from upstate and stay with us was leaving the house with hard drives for copying and on at least two occasions let someone or some ones into the house. They would go to our computers, discs, etc and tamper with them and always leave it or replace them as though nothing ever happened. So it would be weeks or months before Katherine could figure it out. All the while, Kenny Chesney, Tobay Keith, Shania Twain,Brad Paisley, parton, squirt and jerk (I mean big and rich or big and little dick) Gretchen of red neck woman fame, and most of everyone in (especially country) the commercial music "bus" would be claiming to have come up with lyrics that they in a million years couldn't have dreamed of.

And Katherine's genius talent has been for her a total curse, her life is in ruins, and these lying scum in the music business are admired and loved by their fans - all the while they would spit on these same fans if it would make them a buck.

did anyone see the Trump apprentice show when he had Twain on. They sat in a board like room to have a chat with the "great" Shania to learn who to make it in business. The great pseudo phoney genius advice was with careful thought and the realization she couldn't think of anything else to say, "never give up". Well folks there you have it. Thanks Shania you personality - less jerk. This is the "great" one. Folks I allege this person couldn't write a decent song to save her life. As for the melodies perhaps Lange did come up with some of those - I have no idea.

My girlfriend is Indian (as a smart-ass friend of ours puts it: Dot not Feather) and she recently saw a poster for one of her favorite musicians coming to town: Zakir Hussain and the Masters of Percussion. It was near her birthday, so we made an evening of it. He is an Ustaz of the Tabla and good Lord did that man have magiacl hands and fingers! I was so incredibly blown away-not only by his skill but also by every one of the musicians that played with him. I was particularly stunned by Dilshad Khan, the Sarangi player (I had never heard of the Sarangi before that evening). All in all, it may have been one of the most transcendental concerts that I have attended in the past decade. If you are a fan of Indian drumming or the Tabla (or are more familiar with the Sarangi than I was, check out The Masters of Percussion or any Zakir Hussain solo stuff if just drumming is your thing). Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so in return for turning me on to one of the most amazing musicians that I've seen live, I thought I should introduce her to some of my favorite Western music (West as in the Hemisphere, as opposed to the Coast or the style of music). The punk band X was in town for their 30th anniversary tour, and I thought that some good old-fashioned country-punk music would offest the magic of the Hussain show. They kicked some serious ass for aging punks-and it was great to see the original line-up! Gotta say, the two very divergent shows a week apart was quite the enjoyable experience as far as concert attendance goes. Just thought I would share the fun concert experiences, ~Scott

Well, I allege they are singing stolen lyrics on at least one or two of the first hits (that Katherine is aware of). OF course theydeny that they stole this other bands song. Try proving it. As for their excuses:

1) ***First, on the night in October when the band say Chris Martin was watching them, he was actually working at the Air Studio in London*** Maybe *that* is true but we are talking about the big time well financed music business. They can get receipts made up or bribe witnesses to say what they want.

2) ***second, even if he had been at the gig, "Viva la Vida" was written and demoed seven months before the night in question, so it couldn't possibly have been copied*** Oh comon - again the music industry is loaded with tech geeks, or they have the money to bribe computers experts who can fabricate evidence. We had one "professor" from the University of Central Florida who we hired but through phone tapping was known to the people who were robbing us and bribed. Try proving it. Try getting anyone to do anything about it. The only ones who give a hoot are the people who get robbed. I can tell you the entire music industry is filled with people like coldplay who are playing stuff they didn't write, that they claim they write and have far less or no real talent like they go around saying. All the while Federal and State laws are broken all day long while material gets transfered to these lying trash.

Additionally, it is not usually the phoney "frontmen" who are running around stealing the material. There is a whole army of middlemen who scour others in music and steal the material to give to *their* people - those that are "let in" to the business.

The song they didn't write? Coldplay are accused of plagiarism by American band

By Guy Adams in Los AngelesThursday, 19 June 2008

It was all going so predictably well. Coldplay's new album went straight to No 1 on Sunday, selling 300,000 copies in three days; concerts sold out; that iTunes ad was everywhere. Even their notoriously sniffy critics in the music press seemed, with the odd exception, unusually muted.

Then, things took a sudden turn for the worse – with a plagiarism row. Yesterday, the band was forced to issue a categorical denial of allegations that they copied the title track to their new record, Viva La Vida Or Death and All His Friends from a little-known US group, Creaky Boards.

In a video posted on the video-sharing website YouTube, Andrew Hoepfner, Creaky Boards' singer and songwriter, claimed that the melody of Coldplay's song, "Viva La Vida", is pinched from a track he wrote last year called, ironically, "The Songs I Didn't Write".

He blamed Chris Martin for the alleged artistic theft, saying that Coldplay's frontman attended a Creaky Boards concert in New York last year. "We were flattered when we thought we saw Chris Martin in the crowd," said Mr Hoepfner. "He seemed pretty into it... Maybe TOO into it?"

The clip, which was first posted on Sunday, rapidly went viral. By last night, it had been watched by nearly 300,000 people, many thousands of whom had typed comments remarking upon the various similarities between the two tracks. In an industry where even small chord sequences can become subject of costly copyright disputes, allegations of plagiarism are as potentially damaging to a musician's finances as they are to their reputation.

Little surprise, then, that Coldplay responded with a vigorous denial. "We totally refute their claims, and there are two facts that make it easy to disprove them," said the band's spokesman Murray Chalmers. "First, on the night in October when the band say Chris Martin was watching them, he was actually working at the Air Studio in London, and we can prove that. Second, even if he had been at the gig, "Viva la Vida" was written and demoed seven months before the night in question, so it couldn't possibly have been copied."

Sources close to the band said they were unlikely to pursue legal action against Creaky Boards, since it would "look bad" to start a David versus Goliath lawsuit against a group of young musicians. They are, however, pushing for them to publicly withdraw the allegations of plagiarism.

The two tracks have different lyrics, say the Coldplay camp. Although certain elements of their melody sound remarkably similar, the band say this is due to simple coincidence rather than a case of artistic theft.

Either way, the trite nature of Mr Hoepfner's video clip has succeeded in gaining a new following for his band, and was driving traffic to their MySpace page. The YouTube video concludes: "I wish Coldplay the best of luck. If they ever want to collaborate, I've got some microphones we could use in my bedroom."

Creaky Boards' video outlining the similiarities between the two songs

Coldplay are recording several live TV performances to promote their record in the US, but are steering clear of major interviews, following last week's incident on BBC Radio 4 when Martin walked out of an interview with the arts show Front Row, saying he did not like "having to talk about things".

While listening to NPR today there was a little feature about the following band called Homemade Jamz Blues BandThe guitarist \ singer is 15 years old, the bass player is 14 and the drummer is 9.Check out the clip!!

Logged

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

For those of you from the old board may remember I allege Wilson sang many song lyrics that disappeared out of our house including her signature song "red neck woman". From where I sit FWIW I claim she is lying about writing her songs just like her buddies Big and Rich lie about writing theirs. The melodies are probably lifted.

For those of you Wilson fans who don't think Wilson would actually lie and steal you might want to think again:

Only months ago they caused a stir when they accused Maxim magazine of running a lukewarm review of their latest album Warpaint without actually hearing it.

And just yesterday, the band issued a notice of copyright infringement against colorful country singer Gretchen Wilson, her record label, her music publisher, and Turner Network Television--claiming her song "Work Hard Play Harder," currently airing to promote the TNT show Saving Grace, "wrongfully exploited" the band's 1991 debut single "Jealous Again."

While it's possible the alleged infringers can successfully argue that Wilson wrongfully exploited the composition without actually hearing it--hey, it happened before!--there's no need for any of us to wade through any legal mumbo-jumbo.

You make the call. Check it out yourself.

First up, here's the Crowes, from their 1991 multi-platinum debut album Shake Your Money Maker--which, er, coincidentally took its title from a very famous song recorded by blues guitarist Elmore James in 1961.

Next, here's Wilson's "Work Hard Play Harder"--which, as a special bonus, can be enjoyed in the context of this commercial for actress Holly Hunter's acclaimed TNT series Saving Grace.

So, let's see. On one hand we've got a band that--in a presumably non-infringing manner--borrowed its debut album's title from Elmore James, and then saw that same album get reviews systematically comparing it to the music produced by arena-rockers like the Faces and Humble Pie two decades earlier.

On the other hand we've got Ms. Wilson, a popular, newish country singer whose record sales have been on the downslide since her 2004 debut album Here For The Party, and who is now essentially doing commercials for a television program that is supposed to pretty good if you watch it, but I'm a guy.

In short: Ms. Wilson is being accused of ripping off a ‘90s band that was accused of ripping off several ‘70s bands who were accused of ripping off blues artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s who generally never got paid for their work in the first place.

According to Black Crowes manager Pete Angeleus, "We find the music verses of Wilson's song to be such an obvious example of copyright infringement that I expect all parties to reach a relatively quick resolution to avoid litigation."

Well, of course he'd say that, he's their manager. According to me, these songs sound like things you'd hear in a really bad bar about 10 minutes before deciding to go home and watch TV.

2. Yahoo! Music User - Thu Jul 31, 2008 5:20am PDTShame on G. Wilson, her producers, songwriters... whoever didn't step in to differentiate the verses of her song from "Jealous Again." It clearly is a blatant ripoff.

But the Crowes should drop the lawsuit and take it as a compliment, after all they have been around for almost 20 years now and Gretchen is fading fast****

Well she is fading fast because we put a stop to their friends who steal them the songs from people like Katherine and get it to them by keeping Katherine's mother out of the house. She robbed her *own daughter* for years.Finally Katherine has come to terms with that.

Remember Gretchen has claimed John Rich, alias the little prick, has hundreds of songs. Dolly Parton has claimed she has written thousands. Mellencamp has claimed he has hundreds and is turning to song writing. The list goes on.

So why are we not hearing these things? They are waiting to get the evidence from us before they will come out with any of this stuff. They obviously fight amongst themselves for the stolen goods. They get copies of it sift through it, fight over who gets what and wait for the professionals to get back in and get rid of any evidence. They take their time. There are people who moved into the neighborhood to stalk us. They have many different scams. Lawn gardners are always a favorite. Pest control. Why they even infest us with ants or mice to get us to call pest control. We can never get anything related to music in the mail, UPS, or FEDEX. Several steps along the delivery process give them ample ways to get at it. Copyright is tougher for them but they have people bribed at the CRO. Things do disappear or are swicthed. In fact we found out there are very few people in the World who even know the goings on there.

So where are all these hundreds and thousands of songs they claim they wrote? I can guarantee you that if they had all the evidence free and clear these low class trash (yes Parton too) would be singing them. These people live for the glory and cash of being on stage getting praise.

Why does the Rich, imo, a little prick have to sit on Nashville Star as a judge? You don't htink if he really had hundreds of songs (free and clear of someone else who evidence he didn't write them as he claims) wouldn't be out there selling album after album. although his melodies are all starting to sound the same because he can't come up with any new ones so they then will lift one from the 70's or so. Oh and by the way, Jeff Steele who is also a judge as well as Jewel all sing *and claim they wrote* songs just like stuff that disappeared out of our house.

The response is we "are crazy". Or it is "just coincidence". "Or prove it!"

Anyway the above article on Wilson alleged lifting of a Crowe's song will be the last you will ever hear of this. It will just "fade away" probably from a back room deal.

Next thing we might see is the Crowes doing a music deal with G Wilson.

Sugarschmucks the girl with the voice that needs a nose job and her lacky sidekick with the dumbest looking hat in memory - why even the rappers who wear their ball caps on sideways look cooler then this guy.... Sorry my anger spills out.

This group, though, I can say the same for most of the country singers in the last 8 years (though we realize this went back to probably at least 1992), who claims they wrote songs that were exactly like writings stolen from Katherine. Well here it states they were part of a larger band that apparantly went no where. Suddenly in 2002 the remaining two members became musical/lyrical geniuses and became big stars. Doesn't it sound more plausible that they were given the lyrics, someone else came up with the melodies (crummy anyway IMO) and they got "in" with the right group of thugs that control the industry and as the front people are promoted all over the place. They weren't just discovered with incredible talent that they possessed in secret for years, they didn't just become creative geniuses, but, I allege, made deals with the band of thugs who steal the material to be the front people for the behind the scenes group of scumbags that rip off others.

The previous member of the group could easily come out and say she has no idea where in tarnation thes other two suddenly started writing hits but she won't. She wants in so she will play along.

****Sugarland founder files $1.5M lawsuit against band

52 minutes ago

ATLANTA - A founder of the country band Sugarland is suing the two current members of the popular group for $1.5 million.ADVERTISEMENT

According to a lawsuit filed late last month in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Kristen Hall was to get a cut of the group's profits even after she left in 2005 for a solo career. The lawsuit says Hall, who founded the band in 2002, has an agreement with Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush to equally share profits and losses.

Hall says in the lawsuit that she has been excluded from the group's profits since she left.

Sugarland's publicist referred calls to the band's attorney, Gary Gilbert, who was unavailable for comment.

The band's album, "Love on the Inside," released last month, is No. 1 on Billboard music charts.****